Word: evita
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...will have three hits playing simultaneously in both London and New York City. It is only the second time a composer has ever pulled off such a double hat trick. The first was in 1983, and, of course, it was Lloyd Webber who did it. In New York, Evita ran for almost four years; Cats is still selling out five years after its opening...
...Sels, press spokeswoman for the popular production of Cats in Hamburg, "but he can combine classical and popular music in such a way that it appeals to audiences who want both 'entertaining' and 'serious' music." Director Keita Asari, whose Shiki theater company, the largest in Japan, has staged Superstar, Evita and Cats, calls Lloyd Webber a "genius who unfolds melodies through various modes that somewhere reverberate classical music. That's the reason he is universally loved...
Practically alone among present-day theater composers, Lloyd Webber repeatedly hits the Top Ten with his songs: I Don't Know How to Love Him from Superstar; Don't Cry for Me, Argentina from Evita; Memory, the instant standard from Cats. Four songs from Phantom have made the British charts. But despite his unique crossover appeal, his scores are far from cheap tunesmithery. In addition to their obvious debt to rock, Superstar, Evita and Cats also bristle with some hair-raising atonal passages, while Phantom's glorious credo, The Music of the Night, contains one of Lloyd Webber's most...
...even Evita's success could patch over the growing rift between composer and lyricist, and so they parted professional company. "I'm not as interested in working for the sake of working," said Rice. "Andrew wants to be in the center of the musical-theater world all the time." Since the breakup, Rice has had a modest London hit with his Plantagenet saga Blondel and a major triumph in Chess, a cynical look at a championship chess match between a Soviet and an American that boasts a brilliant score by Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, two members of the rock...
...last Rice-Lloyd Webber show was also the best and the most daring: Evita. The authors were condemned for glorifying the right-wing Eva and Juan Peron, even though they intended the show as an allegory of the deteriorating political situation in England in the mid-'70s. Like Superstar, Evita was first released as a record. The task of getting it onstage devolved upon Director Prince; watching Prince put the show together turned out to be a most instructive lesson for Lloyd Webber. "When I came into Evita, there was no script, just a lot of numbers in a shape...